I don't often scour Fortune magazine for book recommendations. However, as I was doing my usual search for subscription cards on a batch of magazines a few weeks ago, this title caught my eye. I grew up in a wine-friendly household, where family vacations to California were split between Disneyland and the wine country. Wine auctions? No way. I found the world presented in this book to be fascinating.The "World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine" went up for auction in 1985. A 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux that had been in Thomas Jefferson's collection, it sold for an astounding $156,000 at Christie's of London to Christopher "Kip" Forbes of the Forbes media empire. Many mysteries surrounded this bottle and the other "Jefferson bottles" that had been found with it. Jefferson's meticulous records showed no definite evidence that he had owned these bottles. The collector who brought them to Christie's, Hardy Rodenstock, withheld details about the bottles, including where he had gotten them, or even the exact number of bottles that he had. It looked more and more like Rodenstock was, at best, peddling fakes to the collecting world, and at worst, deliberately forging wines.
The cast of characters involved is like something out of Dickens. I periodically had to remind myself that this was a non-fiction book, and I wasn't all that surprised to learn that the movie rights have already been optioned.
